Chapter XXXI (1)

GRECIAN AFFAIRS AFTER THE EXPULSION OF THE PEISISTRATIDS. — REVOLUTION OF KLEISTHENES AND ESTABLISHMENT OF DEMOCRACY AT ATHENS.

With Hippias disappeared the mercenary Thracian garrison, upon which he and his father before him had leaned for defence as well as for enforcement of authority; and Kleomenês with his Lacedæmonian forces retired also, after staying only long enough to establish a personal friendship, productive subsequently of important consequences, between the Spartan king and the Athenian Isagoras. The Athenians were thus left to themselves, without any foreign interference to constrain them in their political arrangements.

It has been mentioned in the preceding chapter, that the Peisistratids had for the most part respected the forms of the Solonian constitution: the nine archons, and the probouleutic or preconsidering Senate of Four Hundred (both annually changed), still continued to subsist, together with occasional meetings of the people,—or rather of such portion of the people as was comprised in the gentes, phratries, and four Ionic tribes. The timocratic classification of Solon (or quadruple scale of income and admeasurement of political franchises according to it) also continued to subsist,—but all within the tether and subservient to the purposes of the ruling family, who always kept one of their number as real master, among the chief administrators, and always retained possession of the acropolis as well as of the mercenary force.

That overawing pressure being now removed by the expulsion of Hippias, the enslaved forms became at once endued with freedom and reality. There appeared again, what Attica had not known for thirty years, declared political parties, and pronounced opposition between two men as leaders,—on one side, Isagoras son of Tisander, a person of illustrious descent,—on the other, Kleisthenês the Alkmæônid, not less illustrious, and possessing at this moment a claim on the gratitude of his countrymen as the most persevering as well as the most effective foe of the dethroned despots. In what manner such opposition was carried on we are not told. It would seem to have been not altogether pacific; but at any rate, Kleisthenês had the worst of it, and in consequence of this defeat, says the historian, “he took into partnership the people, who had been before excluded from everything.”[243] His partnership with the people gave birth to the Athenian democracy: it was a real and important revolution.

[243] Herodot. v, 66-69 ἑσσούμενος δὲ ὁ Κλεισθένης τὸν δῆμον
προσεταιρίζεται—ὡς γὰρ δὴ τὸν Ἀθηναίων δῆμον, πρότερον ἀπωσμένον
πάντων, τότε πρὸς τὴν ἑωϋτοῦ μοίρην προσεθήκατο, etc.

The political franchise, or the character of an Athenian citizen, both before and since Solon, had been confined to the primitive four Ionic tribes, each of which was an aggregate of so many close corporations or quasi-families,—the gentes and the phratries. None of the residents in Attica, therefore, except those included in some gens or phratry, had any part in the political franchise. Such non-privileged residents were probably at all times numerous, and became more and more so by means of fresh settlers: moreover, they tended most to multiply in Athens and Peiræus, where emigrants would commonly establish themselves. Kleisthenês broke down the existing wall of privilege, and imparted the political franchise to the excluded mass. But this could not be done by enrolling them in new gentes or phratries, created in addition to the old; for the gentile tie was founded upon old faith and feeling, which, in the existing state of the Greek mind, could not be suddenly conjured up as a bond of union for comparative strangers: it could only be done by disconnecting the franchise altogether from the Ionic tribes as well as from the gentes which constituted them, and by redistributing the population into new tribes with a character and purpose exclusively political. Accordingly, Kleisthenês abolished the four Ionic tribes, and created in their place ten new tribes founded upon a different principle, independent of the gentes and phratries. Each of his new tribes comprised a certain number of demes or cantons, with the enrolled proprietors and residents in each of them. The demes taken altogether included the entire surface of Attica, so that the Kleisthenean constitution admitted to the political franchise all the free native Athenians; and not merely these, but also many Metics, and even some of the superior order of slaves.[244] Putting out of sight the general body of slaves, and regarding only the free inhabitants, it was in point of fact a scheme approaching to universal suffrage, both political and judicial.

[244] Aristot. Polit. iii, 1, 10; vi, 2, 11. Κλεισθένης,—πολλοῖς
ἐφυλέτευσε ξένους καὶ δούλους μετοίκους.

Several able critics, and Dr. Thirlwall among the number,
consider this passage as affording no sense, and assume some
conjectural emendation to be indispensable; though there is no
particular emendation which suggests itself as preëminently
plausible. Under these circumstances, I rather prefer to make
the best of the words as they stand; which, though unusual,
seem to me not absolutely inadmissible. The expression ξένος
μέτοικος (which is a perfectly good one, as we find in Aristoph.
Equit. 347,—εἴπου δικιδίον εἶπας εὖ κατὰ ξένου μετοίκου) may
be considered as the correlative to δούλους μετοίκους,—the
last word being construed both with δούλους and with ξένους. I
apprehend that there always must have been in Attica a certain
number of intelligent slaves living apart from their masters
(χωρὶς οἰκοῦντες), in a state between slavery and freedom,
working partly on condition of a fixed payment to him, partly for
themselves, and perhaps continuing to pass nominally as slaves
after they had bought their liberty by instalments. Such men
would be δοῦλοι μέτοικοι: indeed, there are cases in which δοῦλοι
signifies _freedmen_ (Meier, De Gentilitate Atticâ, p. 6): they
must have been industrious and pushing men, valuable partisans to
a political revolution. See K. F. Hermann, Lehrbuch der Griech.
Staats Alterth. ch. 111, not. 15.

The slight and cursory manner in which Herodotus announces this memorable revolution tends to make us overlook its real importance. He dwells chiefly on the alteration in the number and names of the tribes: Kleisthenês, he says, despised the Ionians so much, that he would not tolerate the continuance in Attica of the four tribes which prevailed in the Ionic cities,[245] deriving their names from the four sons of Ion,—just as his grandfather, the Sikyonian Kleisthenês, hating the Dorians, had degraded and nicknamed the three Dorian tribes at Sikyôn. Such is the representation of Herodotus, who seems himself to have entertained some contempt for the Ionians,[246] and therefore to have suspected a similar feeling where it had no real existence. But the scope of Kleisthenês was something far more extensive: he abolished the four ancient tribes, not because they were Ionic, but because they had become incommensurate with the existing condition of the Attic people, and because such abolition procured both for himself and for his political scheme new as well as hearty allies. And indeed, if we study the circumstances of the case, we shall see very obvious reasons to suggest the proceeding. For more than thirty years—an entire generation—the old constitution had been a mere empty formality, working only in subservience to the reigning dynasty, and stripped of all real controlling power. We may be very sure, therefore, that both the Senate of Four Hundred and the popular assembly, divested of that free speech which imparted to them not only all their value but all their charm, had come to be of little public estimation, and were probably attended only by a few partisans; and thus the difference between qualified citizens and men not so qualified,—between members of the four old tribes, and men not members,—became during this period practically effaced. This, in fact, was the only species of good which a Grecian despotism ever seems to have done: it confounded the privileged and the non-privileged under one coercive authority common to both, so that the distinction between the two was not easy to revive when the despotism passed away. As soon as Hippias was expelled, the senate and the public assembly regained their efficiency. But had they been continued on the old footing, including none except members of the four tribes, these tribes would have been reinvested with a privilege which in reality they had so long lost, that its revival would have seemed an odious novelty, and the remaining population would probably not have submitted to it. If, in addition, we consider the political excitement of the moment,—the restoration of one body of men from exile, and the departure of another body into exile,—the outpouring of long-suppressed hatred, partly against these very forms, by the corruption of which the despot had reigned,—we shall see that prudence as well as patriotism dictated the adoption of an enlarged scheme of government. Kleisthenês had learned some wisdom during his long exile; and as he probably continued, for some time after the introduction of his new constitution, to be the chief adviser of his countrymen, we may consider their extraordinary success as a testimony to his prudence and skill not less than to their courage and unanimity.

[245] Herodot. v, 69. Κλεισθένης,—ὑπεριδὼν Ἴωνας, ἵνα μὴ σφισι αἱ
αὐταὶ ἔωσι φυλαὶ καὶ Ἴωσι.

[246] Such a disposition seems evident in Herodot. i, 143.

Nor does it seem unreasonable to give him credit for a more generous forward movement than what is implied in the literal account of Herodotus. Instead of being forced against his will to purchase popular support by proposing this new constitution, Kleisthenês may have proposed it before, during the discussions which immediately followed the retirement of Hippias; so that the rejection of it formed the ground of quarrel—and no other ground is mentioned—between him and Isagoras. The latter doubtless found sufficient support, in the existing senate and public assembly, to prevent it from being carried without an actual appeal to the people, and his opposition to it is not difficult to understand. For, necessary as the change had become, it was not the less a shock to ancient Attic ideas. It radically altered the very idea of a tribe, which now became an aggregation of demes, not of gentes,—of fellow-demots, not of fellow-gentiles; and it thus broke up those associations, religious, social, and political, between the whole and the parts of the old system, which operated powerfully on the mind of every old-fashioned Athenian. The patricians at Rome, who composed the gentes and curiæ,—and the plebs, who had no part in these corporations,—formed for a long time two separate and opposing fractions in the same city, each with its own separate organization. It was only by slow degrees that the plebs gained ground, and the political value of the patrician gens was long maintained alongside of and apart from the plebeian tribe. So too in the Italian and German cities of the Middle Ages, the patrician families refused to part with their own separate political identity, when the guilds grew up by the side of them; even though forced to renounce a portion of their power, they continued to be a separate fraternity, and would not submit to be regimented anew, under an altered category and denomination, along with the traders who had grown into wealth and importance.[247] But the reform of Kleisthenês effected this change all at once, both as to the name and as to the reality. In some cases, indeed, that which had been the name of a gens was retained as the name of a deme, but even then the old gentiles were ranked indiscriminately among the remaining demots; and the Athenian people, politically considered, thus became one homogeneous whole, distributed for convenience into parts, numerical, local, and politically equal. It is, however, to be remembered, that while the four Ionic tribes were abolished, the gentes and phratries which composed them were left untouched, and continued to subsist as family and religious associations, though carrying with them no political privilege.

[247] In illustration of what is here stated, see the account of
the modifications of the constitution of Zurich, in Blüntschli,
Staats und Rechts Geschichte der Stadt Zurich, book iii. ch. 2,
p. 322; also, Kortüm, Entstehungs Geschichte der Freistädtischen
Bünde im Mittelalter, ch. 5, pp. 74-75.

The ten newly-created tribes, arranged in an established order of precedence, were called,—Erechthêis, Ægêis, Pandiŏnis, Leontis, Akamantis, Œnêis, Kekrŏpis, Hippothoöntis, Æantis, Antiochis; names borrowed chiefly from the respected heroes of Attic legend.[248] This number remained unaltered until the year 305 B. C., when it was increased to twelve by the addition of two new tribes, Antigonias and Demetrias, afterwards designated anew by the names of Ptolemais and Attalis. The mere names of these last two, borrowed from living kings, and not from legendary heroes, betray the change from freedom to subservience at Athens. Each tribe comprised a certain number of demes,—cantons, parishes, or townships,—in Attica. But the total number of these demes is not distinctly ascertained; for though we know that, in the time of Polemô (the third century B. C.), it was one hundred and seventy-four, we cannot be sure that it had always remained the same; and several critics construe the words of Herodotus to imply that Kleisthenês at first recognized exactly one hundred demes, distributed in equal proportion among his ten tribes.[249] But such construction of the words is more than doubtful, while the fact itself is improbable; partly because if the change of number had been so considerable as the difference between one hundred and one hundred and seventy-four, some positive evidence of it would probably be found,—partly because Kleisthenês would, indeed, have a motive to render the amount of citizen population nearly equal, but no motive to render the number of demes equal, in each of the ten tribes. It is well known how great is the force of local habits, and how unalterable are parochial or cantonal boundaries. In the absence of proof to the contrary, therefore, we may reasonably suppose the number and circumscription of the demes, as found or modified by Kleisthenês, to have subsisted afterwards with little alteration, at least until the increase in the number of the tribes.

[248] Respecting these Eponymous Heroes of the Ten Tribes,
and the legends connected with them, see chapter viii of the
Ἐπιτάφιος Λόγος, erroneously ascribed to Demosthenês.

[249] Herodot. v, 69. δέκα δὲ καὶ τοὺς δήμους κατένεμε ἐς τὰς
φυλάς.

Schömann contends that Kleisthenês established exactly one
hundred demes to the ten tribes (De Comitiis Atheniensium, Præf.
p. xv and p. 363, and Antiquitat. Jur. Pub. Græc. ch. xxii, p.
260), and K. F. Hermann (Lehrbuch der Griech. Staats Alt. ch.
111) thinks that this is what Herodotus meant to affirm, though
he does not believe the fact to have really stood so.

I incline, as the least difficulty in the case, to construe δέκα
with φυλὰς and not with δήμους, as Wachsmuth (i, 1, p. 271) and
Dieterich (De Clisthene, a treatise cited by K. F. Hermann, but
which I have not seen) construe it.

There is another point, however, which is at once more certain, and more important to notice. The demes which Kleisthenês assigned to each tribe were in no case all adjacent to each other; and therefore the tribe, as a whole, did not correspond with any continuous portion of the territory, nor could it have any peculiar local interest, separate from the entire community. Such systematic avoidance of the factions arising out of neighborhood will appear to have been more especially necessary, when we recollect that the quarrels of the Parali, the Diakrii, the Pediaki, during the preceding century, had all been generated from local feud, though doubtless artfully fomented by individual ambition. Moreover, it was only by this same precaution that the local predominance of the city, and the formation of a city-interest distinct from that of the country, was obviated; which could hardly have failed to arise had the city by itself constituted either one deme or one tribe. Kleisthenês distributed the city (or found it already distributed) into several demes, and those demes among several tribes; while Peiræus and Phalêrum, each constituting a separate deme, were also assigned to different tribes; so that there were no local advantages either to bestow predominance, or to create a struggle for predominance, of one tribe over the rest.[250] Each deme had its own local interests to watch over; but the tribe was a mere aggregate of demes for political, military, and religious purposes, with no separate hopes or fears, apart from the whole state. Each tribe had a chapel, sacred rites and festivals, and a common fund for such meetings, in honor of its eponymous hero, administered by members of its own choice;[251] and the statues of all the ten eponymous heroes, fraternal patrons of the democracy, were planted in the most conspicuous part of the agora of Athens. In the future working of the Athenian government, we shall trace no symptom of disquieting local factions,—a capital amendment, compared with the disputes of the preceding century, and traceable, in part, to the absence of border-relations between demes of the same tribe.

[250] The deme _Melitê_ belonged to the tribe Kekropis;
_Kollytus_, to the tribe Ægêis; _Kydathenæon_, to the tribe
Pandionis; _Kerameis_ or _Kerameikus_, to the Akamantis;
_Skambônidæ_, to the Leontis.

All these five were demes within the city of Athens, and all
belonged to different tribes.

_Peiræus_ belonged to the Hippothoöntis; _Phalêrum_, to
the Æantis; _Xypetê_, to the Kekropis; _Thymætadæ_, to the
Hippothoöntis. These four demes, adjoining to each other,
formed a sort of quadruple local union, for festivals and other
purposes, among themselves; though three of them belonged to
different tribes.

See the list of the Attic demes, with a careful statement of
their localities in so far as ascertained, in Professor Ross,
Die Demen von Attika. Halle, 1846. The distribution of the
city-demes, and of Peiræus and Phalêrum, among different tribes,
appears to me a clear proof of the intention of the original
distributors. It shows that they wished from the beginning
to make the demes constituting each tribe discontinuous, and
that they desired to prevent both the growth of separate
tribe-interests and ascendency of one tribe over the rest. It
contradicts the belief of those who suppose that the tribe was
at first composed of continuous demes, and that the breach of
continuity arose from subsequent changes.

Of course there were many cases in which adjoining demes belonged
to the same tribe; but not one of the ten tribes was made up
altogether of adjoining demes.

[251] See Boeckh, Corp. Inscriptt. Nos. 85, 128, 213, etc.:
compare Demosthen. cont. Theokrin. c. 4. p. 1326 R.

The deme now became the primitive constituent element of the commonwealth, both as to persons and as to property. It had its own demarch, its register of enrolled citizens, its collective property, its public meetings and religious ceremonies, its taxes levied and administered by itself. The register of qualified citizens[252] was kept by the demarch, and the inscription of new citizens took place at the assembly of the demots, whose legitimate sons were enrolled on attaining the age of eighteen, and their adopted sons at any time when presented and sworn to by the adopting citizen. The citizenship could only be granted by a public vote of the people, but wealthy non-freemen were enabled sometimes to evade this law and purchase admission upon the register of some poor deme, probably by means of a fictitious adoption. At the meetings of the demots, the register was called over, and it sometimes happened that some names were expunged,—in which case the party thus disfranchised had an appeal to the popular judicature.[253] So great was the local administrative power, however, of these demes, that they are described as the substitute,[254] under the Kleisthenean system, for the naukraries under the Solonian and ante-Solonian. The trittyes and naukraries, though nominally preserved, and the latter (as some affirm) augmented in number from forty-eight to fifty, appear henceforward as of little public importance.

[252] We may remark that this register was called by a special
name, the Lexiarchic register; while the primitive register of
phrators and gentiles always retained, even in the time of the
orators, its original name of the common register—Harpokration,
v. Κοινὸν γραμματεῖον καὶ ληξιαρχικόν.

[253] See Schömann, Antiq. Jur. P. Græc. ch. xxiv. The oration
of Demosthenês against Eubulidês is instructive about these
proceedings of the assembled demots: compare Harpokration, v.
Διαψήφισις, and Meier, De Bonis Damnatorum, ch. xii, p. 78, etc.

[254] Aristot. Fragment. de Republ., ed. Neumann.—Ἀθην. πολιτ.
Fr. 40, p. 88; Schol. ad Aristophan. Ran. 37; Harpokration, v.
Δήμαρχος—Ναυκραρικά; Photius, v. Ναυκραρία.

Kleisthenês preserved, but at the same time modified and expanded, all the main features of Solon’s political constitution; the public assembly, or ekklesia,—the preconsidering senate, composed of members from all the tribes,—and the habit of annual election, as well as annual responsibility of magistrates, by and to the ekklesia. The full value must now have been felt of possessing such preëxisting institutions to build upon, at a moment of perplexity and dissension. But the Kleisthenean ekklesia acquired new strength, and almost a new character, from the great increase of the number of citizens qualified to attend it; while the annually-changed senate, instead of being composed of four hundred members taken in equal proportion from each of the old four tribes, was enlarged to five hundred, taken equally from each of the new ten tribes. It now comes before us, under the name of Senate of Five Hundred, as an active and indispensable body throughout the whole Athenian democracy: and the practice now seems to have begun (though the period of commencement cannot be decisively proved), of determining the names of the senators by lot. Both the senate thus constituted, and the public assembly, were far more popular and vigorous than they had been under the original arrangement of Solon.

The new constitution of the tribes, as it led to a change in the annual senate, so it transformed, no less directly, the military arrangements of the state, both as to soldiers and as to officers. The citizens called upon to serve in arms were now marshalled according to tribes,—each tribe having its own taxiarchs as officers for the hoplites, and its own phylarch at the head of the horsemen. Moreover, there were now created for the first time ten strategi, or generals, one from each tribe; and two hipparchs, for the supreme command of the horsemen. Under the prior Athenian constitution it appears that the command of the military force had been vested in the third archon, or polemarch, no strategi then existing; and even after the latter had been created, under the Kleisthenean constitution, the polemarch still retained a joint right of command along with them,—as we are told at the battle of Marathon, where Kallimachus the polemarch not only enjoyed an equal vote in the council of war along with the ten strategi, but even occupied the post of honor on the right wing.[255] The ten generals, annually changed, are thus (like the ten tribes) a fruit of the Kleisthenean constitution, which was at the same time powerfully strengthened and protected by such remodelling of the military force. The functions of the generals becoming more extensive as the democracy advanced, they seem to have acquired gradually not merely the direction of military and naval affairs, but also that of the foreign relations of the city generally,—while the nine archons, including the polemarch, were by degrees lowered down from that full executive and judicial competence which they had once enjoyed, to the simple ministry of police and preparatory justice. Encroached upon by the strategi on one side, they were also restricted in efficiency by the rise of the popular dikasteries or numerous jury-courts, on the other. We may be very sure that these popular dikasteries had not been permitted to meet or to act under the despotism of the Peisistratids, and that the judicial business of the city must then have been conducted partly by the Senate of Areopagus, partly by the archons; perhaps with a nominal responsibility of the latter at the end of their year of office to an acquiescent ekklesia. And if we even assume it to be true, as some writers contend, that the habit of direct popular judicature, over and above this annual trial of responsibility, had been partially introduced by Solon, it must have been discontinued during the long coercion exercised by the supervening dynasty. But the outburst of popular spirit, which lent force to Kleisthenês, doubtless carried the people into direct action as jurors in the aggregate Heliæa, not less than as voters in the ekklesia,—and the change was thus begun which contributed to degrade the archons from their primitive character as judges, into the lower function of preliminary examiners and presidents of a jury. Such convocation of numerous juries, beginning first with the aggregate body of sworn citizens above thirty years of age, and subsequently dividing them into separate bodies or pannels, for trying particular causes, became gradually more frequent and more systematized: until at length, in the time of Periklês, it was made to carry a small pay, and stood out as one of the most prominent features of Athenian life. We cannot particularize the different steps whereby such final development was attained, and the judicial competence of the archon cut down to the mere power of inflicting a small fine; but the first steps of it are found in the revolution of Kleisthenês, and it seems to have been consummated by the reforms of Periklês. Of the function exercised by the nine archons as well as by many other magistrates and official persons at Athens, in convoking a dikastery, or jury-court, bringing on causes for trial,—and presiding over the trial,—a function constituting one of the marks of superior magistracy, and called the Hegemony, or presidency of a dikastery,—I shall speak more at length hereafter. At present, I wish merely to bring to view the increased and increasing sphere of action on which the people entered at the memorable turn of affairs now before us.

[255] Herodot. vi, 109-111.

The financial affairs of the city underwent at this epoch as complete a change as the military: in fact, the appointment of magistrates and officers by tens, one from each tribe, seems to have become the ordinary practice. A board of ten, called Apodektæ, were invested with the supreme management of the exchequer, dealing with the contractors as to those portions of the revenue which were farmed, receiving all the taxes from the collectors, and disbursing them under competent authority. The first nomination of this board is expressly ascribed to Kleisthenês,[256] as a substitute for certain persons called Kôlakretæ, who had performed the same function before, and who were now retained only for subordinate services. The duties of the apodektæ were afterwards limited to receiving the public income, and paying it over to the ten treasurers of the goddess Athênê, by whom it was kept in the inner chamber of the Parthenon, and disbursed as needed; but this more complicated arrangement cannot be referred to Kleisthenês. From his time forward too, the Senate of Five Hundred steps far beyond its original duty of preparing matters for the discussion of the ekklesia: it embraces, besides, a large circle of administrative and general superintendence, which hardly admits of any definition. Its sittings become constant, with the exception of special holidays, and the year is distributed into ten portions called Prytanies,—the fifty senators of each tribe taking by turns the duty of constant attendance during one prytany, and receiving during that time the title of The Prytanes: the order of precedence among the tribes in these duties was annually determined by lot. In the ordinary Attic year of twelve lunar months, or three hundred and fifty-four days, six of the prytanies contained thirty-five days, four of them contained thirty-six: in the intercalated years of thirteen months, the number of days was thirty-eight and thirty-nine respectively. Moreover, a farther subdivision of the prytany into five periods of seven days each, and of the fifty tribe-senators into five bodies of ten each, was recognized: each body of ten presided in the senate for one period of seven days, drawing lots every day among their number for a new chairman, called Epistatês, to whom during his day of office were confided the keys of the acropolis and the treasury, together with the city seal. The remaining senators, not belonging to the prytanizing tribe, might of course attend if they chose; but the attendance of nine among them, one from each of the remaining nine tribes, was imperatively necessary to constitute a valid meeting, and to insure a constant representation of the collective people.

[256] Harpokration, v. Ἀποδέκται.

During those later times known to us through the great orators, the ekklesia, or formal assembly of the citizens, was convoked four times regularly during each prytany, or oftener if necessity required,—usually by the senate, though the stratêgi had also the power of convoking it by their own authority. It was presided over by the prytanes, and questions were put to the vote by their epistatês, or chairman; but the nine representatives of the non-prytanizing tribes were always present as a matter of course, and seem, indeed, in the days of the orators, to have acquired to themselves the direction of it, together with the right of putting questions for the vote,[257]—setting aside wholly or partially the fifty prytanes. When we carry our attention back, however, to the state of the ekklesia, as first organized by Kleisthenês (I have already remarked that expositors of the Athenian constitution are too apt to neglect the distinction of times, and to suppose that what was the practice between 400-330 B. C. had been always the practice), it will appear probable that he provided one regular meeting in each prytany, and no more; giving to the senate and the stratêgi power of convening special meetings if needful, but establishing one ekklesia during each prytany, or ten in the year, as a regular necessity of state. How often the ancient ekklesia had been convoked during the interval between Solon and Peisistratus, we cannot exactly say,—probably but seldom during the year. But under the Peisistratids, its convocation had dwindled down into an inoperative formality; and the reëstablishment of it by Kleisthenês, not merely with plenary determining powers, but also under full notice and preparation of matters beforehand, together with the best securities for orderly procedure, was in itself a revolution impressive to the mind of every Athenian citizen. To render the ekklesia efficient, it was indispensable that its meetings should be both frequent and free. Men thus became trained to the duty both of speakers and hearers, and each man, while he felt that he exercised his share of influence on the decision, identified his own safety and happiness with the vote of the majority, and became familiarized with the notion of a sovereign authority which he neither could nor ought to resist. This is an idea new to the Athenian bosom; and with it came the feelings sanctifying free speech and equal law,—words which no Athenian citizen ever afterwards heard unmoved: together with that sentiment of the entire commonwealth as one and indivisible, which always overruled, though it did not supplant, the local and cantonal special ties. It is not too much to say that these patriotic and ennobling impulses were a new product in the Athenian mind, to which nothing analogous occurs even in the time of Solon. They were kindled in part doubtless by the strong reaction against the Peisistratids, but still more by the fact that the opposing leader, Kleisthenês, turned that transitory feeling to the best possible account, and gave to it a vigorous perpetuity, as well as a well-defined positive object, by the popular elements conspicuous in his constitution. His name makes less figure in history than we should expect, because he passed for the mere renovator of Solon’s scheme of government after it had been overthrown by Peisistratus. Probably he himself professed this object, since it would facilitate the success of his propositions: and if we confine ourselves to the letter of the case, the fact is in a great measure true, since the annual senate and the ekklesia are both Solonian,—but both of them under his reform were clothed in totally new circumstances, and swelled into gigantic proportions. How vigorous was the burst of Athenian enthusiasm, altering instantaneously the position of Athens among the powers of Greece, we shall hear presently from the lips of Herodotus, and shall find still more unequivocally marked in the facts of his history.

[257] See the valuable treatise of Schömann, De Comitiis,
_passim_; also his Antiq. Jur. Publ. Gr. ch. xxxi; Harpokration,
v. Κυρία Ἐκκλησία; Pollux, viii, 95.

But it was not only the people formally installed in their ekklesia, who received from Kleisthenês the real attributes of sovereignty,—it was by him also that the people were first called into direct action as dikasts, or jurors. I have already remarked, that this custom may be said, in a certain limited sense, to have begun in the time of Solon, since that lawgiver invested the popular assembly with the power of pronouncing the judgment of accountability upon the archons after their year of office. Here, again, the building, afterwards so spacious and stately, was erected on a Solonian foundation, though it was not itself Solonian. That the popular dikasteries, in the elaborate form in which they existed from Periklês downward, were introduced all at once by Kleisthenês, it is impossible to believe; yet the steps by which they were gradually wrought out are not distinctly discoverable. It would rather seem, that at first only the aggregate body of citizens above thirty years of age exercised judicial functions, being specially convoked and sworn to try persons accused of public crimes, and when so employed bearing the name of the heliæa, or heliasts; private offences and disputes between man and man being still determined by individual magistrates in the city, and a considerable judicial power still residing in the Senate of Areopagus. There is reason to believe that this was the state of things established by Kleisthenês, and which afterwards came to be altered by the greater extent of judicial duty gradually accruing to the heliasts, so that it was necessary to subdivide the collective heliæa. According to the subdivision, as practised in the times best known, six thousand citizens above thirty years of age were annually selected by lot out of the whole number, six hundred from each of the ten tribes: five thousand of these citizens were arranged in ten pannels or decuries of five hundred each, the remaining one thousand being reserved to fill up vacancies in case of death or absence among the former. The whole six thousand took a prescribed oath, couched in very striking words, and every man received a ticket inscribed with his own name as well as with a letter designating his decury. When there were causes or crimes ripe for trial, the thesmothets, or six inferior archons, determined by lot, first, which decuries should sit, according to the number wanted,—next, in which court, or under the presidency of what magistrate, the decury B or E should sit, so that it could not be known beforehand in what cause each would be judge. In the number of persons who actually attended and sat, however, there seems to have been much variety, and sometimes two decuries sat together.[258] The arrangement here described, we must recollect, is given to us as belonging to those times when the dikasts received a regular pay, after every day’s sitting; and it can hardly have long continued without that condition, which was not realized before the time of Periklês. Each of these decuries sitting in judicature was called _The Heliæa_,—a name which belongs properly to the collective assembly of the people; this collective assembly having been itself the original judicature. I conceive that the practice of distributing this collective assembly, or heliæa, into sections of jurors for judicial duty, may have begun under one form or another soon after the reform of Kleisthenês, since the direct interference of the people in public affairs tended more and more to increase. But it could only have been matured by degrees into that constant and systematic service which the pay of Periklês called forth at last in completeness. Under the last-mentioned system the judicial competence of the archons was annulled, and the third archon, or polemarch, withdrawn from all military functions. Still, this had not been yet done at the time of the battle of Marathon, in which Kallimachus the polemarch not only commanded along with the stratêgi, but enjoyed a sort of preëminence over them: nor had it been done during the year after the battle of Marathon, in which Aristeidês was archon,—for the magisterial decisions of Aristeidês formed one of the principal foundations of his honorable surname, the Just.[259]

[258] See in particular on this subject the treatise of Schömann,
De Sortitione Judicum (Gripswald, 1820), and the work of the
same author, Antiq. Jur. Publ. Græc. ch. 49-55, p. 264, _seqq._;
also Heffter, Die Athenäische Gerichtsverfassung, part ii, ch.
2, p. 51, _seqq._; Meier and Schömann, Der Attische Prozess, pp.
127-135.

The views of Schömann respecting the sortition of the Athenian
jurors have been bitterly attacked, but in no way refuted, by F.
V. Fritzsche (De Sortitione Judicum apud Athenienses Conmentatio,
Leipsic, 1835).

Two or three of these dikastic tickets, marking the name and the
deme of the citizen, and the letter of the decury to which during
that particular year he belonged, have been recently dug up near
Athens:—

Δ. Διόδωρος Ε. Δεινίας
Φρεάῤῥιος. Ἀλαιεύς.

(Boeckh, Corp. Inscrip. Nos. 207-208.)

Fritzsche (p. 73) considers these to be tickets of senators, not
of dikasts, contrary to all probability.

For the Heliastic oath, and its remarkable particulars, see
Demosthen. cont. Timokrat. p. 746. See also Aristophanês, Plutus,
277 (with the valuable Scholia, though from different hands and
not all of equal correctness) and 972; Ekklesiazusæ, 678, _seqq._

[259] Plutarch, Arist. 7; Herodot. vi, 109-111.

With this question, as to the comparative extent of judicial power vested by Kleisthenês in the popular dikastery and the archons, are in reality connected two others in Athenian constitutional law; relating, first, to the admissibility of all citizens for the post of archon,—next, to the choosing of archons by lot. It is well known that, in the time of Periklês, the archons, and various other individual functionaries, had come to be chosen by lot,—moreover, all citizens were legally admissible, and might give in their names to be drawn for by lot, subject to what was called the dokimasy, or legal examination into their status of citizen, and into various moral and religious qualifications, before they took office; while at the same time the function of the archon had become nothing higher than preliminary examination of parties and witnesses for the dikastery, and presidence over it when afterwards assembled, together with the power of imposing by authority a fine of small amount upon inferior offenders.

Now all these three political arrangements hang essentially together. The great value of the lot, according to Grecian democratical ideas, was that it equalized the chance of office between rich and poor. But so long as the poor citizens were legally inadmissible, choice by lot could have no recommendation either to the rich or to the poor; in fact, it would be less democratical than election by the general mass of citizens, because the poor citizen would under the latter system enjoy an important right of interference by means of his suffrage, though he could not be elected himself.[260] Again, choice by lot could never under any circumstances be applied to those posts where special competence, and a certain measure of attributes possessed only by a few, could not be dispensed with without obvious peril,—nor was it ever applied, throughout the whole history of democratical Athens, to the stratêgi, or generals, who were always elected by show of hands of the assembled citizens. Accordingly, we may regard it as certain that, at the time when the archons first came to be chosen by lot, the superior and responsible duties once attached to that office had been, or were in course of being, detached from it, and transferred either to the popular dikasts or to the ten elected stratêgi: so that there remained to these archons only a routine of police and administration, important indeed to the state, yet such as could be executed by any citizen of average probity, diligence, and capacity. At least there was no obvious absurdity in thinking so; and the dokimasy excluded from the office men of notoriously discreditable life, even after they might have drawn the successful lot. Periklês,[261] though chosen stratêgus, year after year successively, was never archon; and it may even be doubted whether men of first-rate talents and ambition often gave in their names for the office. To those of smaller aspirations[262] it was doubtless a source of importance, but it imposed troublesome labor, gave no pay, and entailed a certain degree of peril upon any archon who might have given offence to powerful men, when he came to pass through the trial of accountability which followed immediately upon his year of office. There was little to make the office acceptable either to very poor men, or to very rich and ambitious men; and between the middling persons who gave in their names, any one might be taken without great practical mischief, always assuming the two guarantees of the dokimasy before, and accountability after, office. This was the conclusion—in my opinion a mistaken conclusion, and such as would find no favor at present—to which the democrats of Athens were conducted by their strenuous desire to equalize the chances of office for rich and poor. But their sentiment seems to have been satisfied by a partial enforcement of the lot to the choice of some offices,—especially the archons, as the primitive chief magistrates of the state,—without applying it to all, or to the most responsible and difficult. Nor would they have applied it to the archons, if it had been indispensably necessary that these magistrates should retain their original very serious duty of judging disputes and condemning offenders.

[260] Aristotle puts these two together; election of magistrates
by the mass of the citizens, but only out of persons possessing
a high pecuniary qualification; this he ranks as the least
democratical democracy, if one may use the phrase (Politic.
iii, 6-11), or a mean between democracy and oligarchy,—an
ἀριστοκρατία, or πολιτεῖα, in his sense of the word (iv, 7, 3).
He puts the employment of the lot as a symptom of decisive and
extreme democracy, such as would never tolerate a pecuniary
qualification of eligibility.

So again Plato (Legg. iii, p. 692), after remarking that the
legislator of Sparta first provided the senate, next the ephors,
as a bridle upon the kings, says of the ephors that they were
“something nearly approaching to an authority emanating from the
lot,”—οἷον ψάλιον ἐνέβαλεν αὐτῇ τὴν τῶν ἐφόρων δύναμιν, ἐγγὺς τῆς
κληρωτῆς ἀγαγὼν δυνάμεως.

Upon which passage there are some good remarks in Schömann’s
edition of Plutarch’s Lives of Agis and Kleomenês (Comment. ad
Ag. c. 8, p. 119). It is to be recollected that the actual mode
in which the Spartan ephors were chosen, as I have already stated
in my first volume, cannot be clearly made out, and has been much
debated by critics:—

“Mihi hæc verba, quum illud quidem manifestum faciant, quod etiam
aliunde constat, sorte captos ephoros non esse, tum hoc alterum,
quod Hermannus statuit, creationem sortitioni non absimilem
fuisse, nequaquam demonstrare videntur. Nimirum nihil aliud nisi
prope accedere ephororum magistratus ad cos dicitur, qui sortito
capiantur. _Sortitis autem magistratibus hoc maxime proprium est,
ut promiscue—non ex genere, censu, dignitate—a quolibet capi
possint_: quamobrem quum ephori quoque fere promiscue fierent ex
omni multitudine civium, poterat haud dubie magistratus eorum
ἐγγὺς τῆς κληρωτῆς δυνάμεως esse dici, etiamsi αἱρετοὶ essent—h.
e. suffragiis creati. Et video Lachmannum quoque, p. 165, not. 1,
de Platonis loco similiter judicare.”

The employment of the lot, as Schömann remarks, implies universal
admissibility of all citizens to office: though the converse does
not hold good,—the latter does not of necessity imply the former.
Now, as we know that universal admissibility did not become
the law of Athens until after the battle of Platæa, so we may
conclude that the employment of the lot had no place before that
epoch,—_i. e._ had no place under the constitution of Kleisthenês.

[261] Plutarch, Periklês, c. 9-16.

[262] See a passage about such characters in Plato, Republic, v,
p. 475 B.

I think, therefore, that these three points: 1. The opening of the post of archon to all citizens indiscriminately; 2. The choice of archons by lot; 3. The diminished range of the archon’s duties and responsibilities, through the extension of those belonging to the popular courts of justice on the one hand and to the stratêgi on the other—are all connected together, and must have been simultaneous, or nearly simultaneous, in the time of introduction: the enactment of universal admissibility to office certainly not coming after the other two, and probably coming a little before them.

Now in regard to the eligibility of all Athenians indiscriminately to the office of archon, we find a clear and positive testimony as to the time when it was first introduced. Plutarch tells us[263] that the oligarchical,[264] but high-principled Aristeidês, was himself the proposer of this constitutional change,—shortly after the battle of Platæa, with the consequent expulsion of the Persians from Greece, and the return of the refugee Athenians to their ruined city. Seldom has it happened in the history of mankind, that rich and poor have been so completely equalized as among the population of Athens in that memorable expatriation and heroic struggle. Nor are we at all surprised to hear that the mass of the citizens, coming back with freshly-kindled patriotism as well as with the consciousness that their country had only been recovered by the equal efforts of all, would no longer submit to be legally disqualified from any office of state. It was on this occasion that the constitution was first made really “common” to all, and that the archons, stratêgi, and all functionaries, first began to be chosen from all Athenians without any difference of legal eligibility.[265] No mention is made of the lot, in this important statement of Plutarch, which appears to me every way worthy of credit, and which teaches us that, down to the invasion of Xerxês, not only had the exclusive principle of the Solonian law of qualification continued in force (whereby the first three classes on the census were alone admitted to all individual offices, and the fourth or Thêtic class excluded), but also the archons had hitherto been elected by the citizens,—not taken by lot.

[263] Plutarch, Arist. 22.

[264] So at least the supporters of the constitution of
Kleisthenês were called by the contemporaries of Periklês.

[265] Plutarch, Arist. _ut sup._ γράφει ψήφισμα, κοινὴν εἶναι τὴν
πολιτείαν, καὶ τοὺς ἄρχοντας ἐξ Ἀθηναίων πάντων αἱρεῖσθαι.

Now for financial purposes, the quadruple census of Solon was retained long after this period, even beyond the Peloponnesian war and the oligarchy of Thirty. But we thus learn that Kleisthenês in his constitution retained it for political purposes also, in part at least: he recognized the exclusion of the great mass of the citizens from all individual offices,—such as the archon, the stratêgus, etc. In his time, probably, no complaints were raised on the subject. His constitution gave to the collective bodies—senate, ekklesia, and heliæa, or dikastery—a degree of power and importance such as they had never before known or imagined: and we may well suppose that the Athenian people of that day had no objection even to the proclaimed system and theory of being exclusively governed by men of wealth and station as individual magistrates,—especially since many of the newly-enfranchised citizens had been previously metics and slaves. Indeed, it is to be added that, even under the full democracy of later Athens, though the people had then become passionately attached to the theory of equal admissibility of all citizens to office, yet, in practice, poor men seldom obtained offices which were elected by the general vote, as will appear more fully in the course of this history.[266]

[266] So in the Italian republics of the twelfth and thirteenth
century, the nobles long continued to possess the exclusive right
of being elected to the consulate and the great offices of state,
even after those offices had come to be elected by the people:
the habitual misrule and oppression of the nobles gradually put
an end to this right, and even created in many towns a resolution
positively to exclude them. At Milan, towards the end of the
twelfth century, the twelve consuls, with the Podestat, possessed
all the powers of government: these consuls were nominated by
one hundred electors chosen by and among the people. Sismondi
observes: “Cependant le peuple imposa lui-même a ces électeurs,
la règle fondamentale de choisir tous les magistrats dans le
corps de la noblesse. Ce n’étoit point encore la possession des
magistratures que l’on contestoit aux gentilshommes: on demandoit
seulement qu’ils fussent les mandataires immédiats de la nation.
Mais plus d’une fois, en dépit du droit incontestable des
citoyens, les consuls regnant s’attribuèrent l’élection de leurs
successeurs.” (Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques Italiennes,
chap. xii, vol. ii, p. 240.)

The choice of the stratêgi remained ever afterwards upon the footing on which Aristeidês thus placed it. But the lot for the choice of archon must have been introduced shortly after his proposition of universal eligibility, and in consequence too of the same tide of democratical feeling,—introduced as a farther corrective, because the poor citizen, though he had become eligible, was nevertheless not elected. And at the same time, I imagine, that elaborate distribution of the Heliæa, or aggregate body of dikasts, or jurors, into separate pannels, or dikasteries, for the decision of judicial matters, was first regularized. It was this change that stole away from the archons so important a part of their previous jurisdiction: it was this change that Periklês more fully consummated by insuring pay to the dikasts. But the present is not the time to enter into the modifications which Athens underwent during the generation after the battle of Platæa. They have been here briefly noticed for the purpose of reasoning back, in the absence of direct evidence, to Athens as it stood in the generation before that memorable battle, after the reform of Kleisthenês. His reform, though highly democratical, stopped short of the mature democracy which prevailed from Periklês to Demosthenês, in three ways especially, among various others; and it is therefore sometimes considered by the later writers as an aristocratical constitution:[267] 1. It still recognized the archons as judges to a considerable extent, and the third archon, or polemarch, as joint military commander along with the stratêgi. 2. It retained them as elected annually by the body of citizens, not as chosen by lot.[268] 3. It still excluded the fourth class of the Solonian census from all individual office, the archonship among the rest. The Solonian law of exclusion, however, though retained in principle, was mitigated in practice thus far,—that whereas Solon had rendered none but members of the highest class on the census (the Pentakosiomedimni) eligible to the archonship, Kleisthenês opened that dignity to all the first three classes, shutting out only the fourth. That he did this may be inferred from the fact that Aristeidês, assuredly not a rich man, became archon.

[267] Plutarch, Kimon, c. 15. τὴν ἐπὶ Κλεισθένους ἐγείρειν
ἀριστοκρατίαν πειρωμένου: compare Plutarch, Aristeidês, c. 2, and
Isokratês, Areopagiticus, Or. vii, p. 143, p. 192, ed. Bek.

[268] Herodotus speaks of Kallimachus the Polemarch, at Marathon,
as ὁ τῷ κυάμῳ λαχὼν Πολέμαρχος (vi, 110).

I cannot but think that in this case he transfers to the year
490 B. C. the practice of his own time. The polemarch, at the
time of the battle of Marathon, was in a certain sense the first
stratêgus; and the stratêgi were never taken by lot, but always
chosen by show of hands, even to the end of the democracy. It
seems impossible to believe that the stratêgi were elected, and
that the polemarch, at the time when his functions were the same
as theirs, was chosen by lot.

Herodotus seems to have conceived the choice of magistrates by
lot as being of the essence of a democracy (Herodot. iii, 80).

Plutarch also (Periklês, c. 9) seems to have conceived the
choice of archons by lot as a very ancient institution of
Athens: nevertheless, it results from the first chapter of his
life of Aristeidês,—an obscure chapter, in which conflicting
authorities are mentioned without being well discriminated,—that
Aristeidês was _chosen archon by the people_,—not drawn by lot:
an additional reason for believing this is, that he was archon in
the year following the battle of Marathon, at which, he had been
one of the ten generals. Idomeneus distinctly affirmed this to be
the fact.—οὐ κυαμευτὸν, ἀλλ᾽ ἑλομένων Ἀθηναίων (Plutarch, Arist.
c. 1).